Description

A vacant building that had contained the generator for a glass factory in the town of Bärnbach in the western part of the province of Styria, a structure with a reinforced concrete skeleton dating back to the post-war period, is the nucleus of the Styrian Regional Exhibition of 1988, the theme of which was industrial culture characterized by opencast coal mining and glass production. The architect sheathed this industrial monument interpreted as an “objet trouvé” on three sides with new elements, large-format slabs attached to the core building by filigree structures. Illustrating the glass theme with a wealth of variation, these slabs – some transparent, some opaque, some translucent – contrast with the robust core building, whose grid-form structure is clearly shown now that it is exposed, the partition walls having been removed.

This sheath dissolves the boundaries between inside and outside and generates sophisticated lighting effects. It also serves to integrate the building into its surroundings – having the frontage parallel the street, and placing the wall facing toward the river obliquely and thus parallel with the railway line running along its bank anchors the building in its urban environment. First and foremost, however, it creates space for the multi-storey entrance hall, an “unperspectivist space” that narrows toward the back like a funnel and leads via several levels into the exhibition rooms inside the core building, where glass objects are mounted in glass display cases. The fragile-seeming corrugated iron ceiling of the entrance hall does not extend all the way to the walls, but appears to float between glass bands, elucidating the triangular ground plan of the entrance hall and emphasizing in a variety of ways the contrast to the cubic grid structure of the static old building.

A sculptural element at the entrance front endows the crosswise joining of polygonal basic forms – called the “axonometric explosion,” but strikingly simple in the final analysis – with the crucial supplement that gives the building its unmistakable character. A cylinder of corrugated iron, diagonally capped (the museum shop is inside it) bulges into the street, linking, jointlike, the main volume with the entrance hall, appearing to break through its glass wall, and almost literally sucking visitors into it.

 

Laurence Allégret, Musées, Paris, 1987, pp. 12-17 • The Architectural Review 113/1989, pp. 48-54 (Peter Blundell Jones) • L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 264/1989, pp. 153-157 • Techniques et Architecture 383/1989, pp. 95-99 • Werk, Bauen + Wohnen 1-2/1989, pp. 4-9 (Ernst Hubeli) • Bauwelt 32/1990, pp. 1580-1586 • Deutsche Bauzeitung 7/1991, pp. 46-50 • Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 1/1991, pp. 47-49 • Alexander Tzonis/Liane Lefaivre, Architecture in Europe since 1968, London, 1992, pp. 208-209 • Jan Tabor, “Steirisches Glaskunstzentrum und Glasmuseum Bärnbach”, in: Architektur als Engagement. Architektur aus der Steiermark 1986-1992, Graz, 1993, pp. 20-21 • Otto Kapfinger et al, Klaus Kada (Portraits of Austrian Architects, vol. 4), Vienna, 2000, pp. 30-43

 

---

Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.